[RELEASE] InterstellarRescue.oxp

[Switeck]

The station is a mechanism; it’s not important. What’s needed is a good backstory/motivation.

To make things happen at all, sometimes you have to use technically ridiculous/impossible things in-universe.
This is why it's even MORE important to hide "the man behind the curtain" and tell a good cover story...I mean background story.

[Commander McLane]

The station is a mechanism; it’s not important. What’s needed is a good backstory/motivation.

To make things happen at all, sometimes you have to use technically ridiculous/impossible things in-universe.
This is why it's even MORE important to hide "the man behind the curtain" and tell a good cover story...I mean background story.

Well, yeah, of course. Having a background story other than "it magically appears" was all I asked the OXP author for. So far he's refusing/ignoring/not understanding the request (I don't know which of the three).

[Okti]

Unfortunately most of the OXP's written does not support a story according to core game.

As an example I tried a miss jump between Tiared and Maedrebe in G7, which is 6.8 LY away after taking the Thargoids with an EBomb, with no fuel at all, a ferdelance appeared magically and informed me to jump through its wormhole.

I can not understand the logic behind this, if ferdy is using fuel collectors than OK, but that is an OXP as well.

So I think, we better not go in those juvenile discussions and try to make the game better. No one deserves his work to be categorized as silly.

Okti

[Commander McLane]

No backstory?

Although you have a point. For practical reasons the code of Interstellar Help does not subtract fuel from the helper for the jump that brought him into interstellar space. On the other hand, it's imaginable that he used either his fuel scoops or had a fuel tank. Both are known to exist.

Of course, if you object to the OXP and/or the in-universe reasoning behind it, you're free to remove it from your AddOns. That's why the backstory and the in-universe reasoning behind it are presented clearly up-front on the Wiki and in its readMe, to let you choose whether you think it's an expansion which could take place in the Oolite world as we know it, or not. A couple of hundred people who have downloaded it seem to have given it a chance, at least.

[Okti]

So the story may be left to the player

The fuel Tanks is an OXP, and in interstellar space there is no way to use fuel scoops.

So I will stop and ignore any posts later on and leave it to the players imagination.

But I would like to have more positive dialog with you regarding a guide line about writing OXP's.

I will try to do that in a week.

[Okti]

To Make it more clear,

All the OXP's are usefull in their context whether they support a story or not, but we must find a way they can be temprorarally suspended by the other OXP's.

As an example if some one is working on a mission which takes place in interstellar space the last thing he wants to see is a ship waving at the player.

I have only seen an example of allowing the other OXP's disabling the behavior of a specific OXP on Thargoids PlanetFall. So I must congratulate Thargoid about thinking that.

The only think I would ask is, for the OXP writers, to provide a mechanism to suspend their functionality if an OXP needs it.

We may all agree on a Property used by all OXP's to disable their normal behavior.

Thanks.
Okti

[Commander McLane]

To Make it more clear,

All the OXP's are usefull in their context whether they support a story or not, but we must find a way they can be temprorarally suspended by the other OXP's.

That's a very good point, and currently there is no good general solution. Especially if scripting a mission, the scripter has to take into account all sorts of OXPs and how they could interfere with his storyline, by making things either too easy or too tough in the wrong moment. It would be much easier to script for a known environment, but we don't have that in Oolite, because each player builds his own, different environment.

One way would be to put a big warning sticker on the OXP: "This OXP is not compatible with abc.oxp. Using it together with abc.oxp may lead to unexpected results." But of course this is unsatisfactory. OXPs should generally play together.

To circumvent or, as you put it, temporarily suspend abc.oxp seems more elegant, although it is ultimately equally unsatisfactory from the player's perspective. Still, quite some OXPs do it. The ur-example may be Assassins.oxp temporarily disabling the player's cloaking device during its missions, in order to create a controlled environment. By the time he begins Assassins.oxp, the player may or may not have a cloaking device. Obviously having one makes assassinations much easier, therefore all missions would have to be balanced totally differently for players with or without cloaking device. That would have required a lot of extra work, therefore Assassins.oxp goes the easier way by removing your cloaking device as long as you're on a mission, and re-warding it after finishing the mission. While this may seem fine from the scripter's perspective (controlled environment), the player may find that being temporarily deprived of his honestly earned cloaking device sucks.

So there is no general good solution.

On the other hand, in many cases the player won't notice that one of his OXPs is temporarily disabling another OXP. Taking your example: for some reason you want to make absolutely sure that under certain circumstances (for instance during one stage of a mission) the player is stuck in interstellar space. Then you have to know which OXPs can allow him to escape the situation, and try to temporarily disable the effects of these OXPs: Fuel Collector (either temporarily remove the equipment or create a fuel leak every couple of minutes); Fuel Tank (remove the tanks); Interstellar Help (either remove the helper before he gets close to the player, or remove the equipment that calls the helper); Behemoth or other carriers (make sure that the player launches into interstellar space again); Interstellar Rescue (I don't know; you wrote it). I hope that I got them all, but probably there are others. And then hope that the player really doesn't notice, and won't file a bug report for the OXPs which apparently have stopped working.

One last thought: a general temporarily-suspend-OXPs solution would also require that all OXP authors agree that their OXPs may be temporarily suspended. I'm not sure that everybody would. Another reason why a general solution doesn't exist.

[Svengali]

Checking quite a few OXPs is absolutely no solution. Maybe we can introduce some kind of missionVariable(s) to make these checks more easy like the mission_offering Eric has introduced to avoid the screen clashes. OXPs can change their internal ways/variables/properties, but if we agree on some mVs this would help a lot.

[Kaks]

To go back to the back story for the moment, what I think McLane is saying here is that it'd be nice if you helped the players' imagination.

There's only so much suspension of disbelief people can have, and by giving them a kind-of explanation: blah blah cloaked ancient stations - blah blah reveal themselves only to 'builders' - blah blah ancient programming back door found by Kh't-Praww - you can suddenly help fit 'magic' into 'science fiction'.

One thing that puzzles me slightly is why stations instead of carriers? A carrier appearing in interstellar space (or even better, jumping in!) requires a lot less suspension of disbelief as suddenly seeing a station that wasn't there a moment ago, and carriers jumping to nearby systems while the player is docked doesn't require any major mental stretching either...


About the OXP itself, I wouldn't make it 100% reliable, myself... interstellar space 'should' feel risky and 'wrong' at all times IMO. If it's unreliable to begin with, it will help if/when it needs to be suspended by another OXP, from a backstory/suspension of disbelief point of view, of course...

[Commander McLane]

To go back to the back story for the moment, what I think McLane is saying here is that it'd be nice if you helped the players' imagination.

That's more or less it.

I try another way to get my point across: the basic purpose of Interstellar Help and Interstellar Rescue is the same: give the player a way of getting out of a doom situation. The execution is different.

Interstellar Help tries to do it from within the game. It's premise is not that you're playing a game, but that you're actually cruising the galaxy. There are others just like you, and everybody is aware of the risk of getting stuck in interstellar space. Therefore pilots would help each other out. Whoever has taken precaution (fuel tanks, fuel collector, whatever) offers his services to others who didn't take the same precaution, for a price. All of that works within the game, it doesn't require you to leave the game and remember that you're actually sitting in front of a computer playing a game.

From what I've understood about it, Interstellar Rescue is different. It is more like a game-options menu is popping up and informs you that you've brought yourself into an unwinnable situation. Therefore it offers you to return to the start of your current level and re-play. (It's not exactly like that, I know, but I hope it's at least a working analogy.) You may or may not choose that option, but either way you're no longer inside the game, but on a meta-level.

While in Interstellar Help it's some characters who communicate with you, in Interstellar Rescue it's the game that communicates with you. It breaks immersion and reminds you that you're not actually in a space ship, but in front of a computer game.

Therefore 'cheat' is an inappropriate moniker, and I take it back. It's not a cheat, but rather an immersion-breaker.

Having said that, I do think that breaking the player's immersion is a bad thing and should be avoided wherever possible. Therefore I think that Interstellar Rescue in its current form is not a good solution to the underlying problem. The real challenge is to work with the concept and transform it in a way that it doesn't break immersion.

I hope I've made myself clearer now.

[Spartan]

Hmmm.... Thargoids and Navy are all dead and I have no fuel. Ok, this bites. Guess I may as well look around, got nothing but time at the moment, those three stars look like a good reference point, beginning search pattern. Lots of nothing so far. Ah, what's this? something in the distance, out of sensor range, must be fairly large to be seen this far. Torus drive... is go.

A Behemoth! No response, no signals... and my God, look at the damage, it's a wonder she didn't blow. Radiation low, still, not a good idea to be in that for long. Hangar bay seems intact....

Damn, I wonder if she has any fuel left? Navy tends to have multiple sections just for situations as this... Wonder if anyone is trapped in there? Damned sure rescue would bring a good reward. What the hell, manual landing on this might be tight but nothing to lose, here goes.

Well, I needed to repaint anyway. I'm sure those scratches will burnish out. Lets see if we can get this workstation going.. Hot damn! There's fuel! Now to see if I can route it to the hangar refueling station.

"ALERT ALERT ALERT Any section. Any section. This is Lieutenant Smythe in CiC, we have four survivors here, six more in Medbay two. Anyone out there please respond. Comm is down but the computer system is functioning on backup circuits. ALERT ALERT ALERT"

Looks like we all get a break. "Mr Smythe, this is Reserve Commander Spartan, I've just landed in the hangar. Lets see if we can get you all up here, get me refueled and get the hell out of here."

[Commander Wilmot]

Spartan's explanation is a good one, but I feel that the derelict carrier should send a comm signal to the player before he notices it, just an automated distress signal. "Behemoth NCC-1701 Enterprise requesting assistance from any nearby galcoop craft." Otherwise, the player might not notice it, a player like me with a fuel collector might just take off, the manual for them says to get up to max speed, and I might engage the torus drive just so I am not sitting around twiddling my thumbs. If the ship was the size of a generation ship it would be different, but for ships like a deep space dredger or a behemoth, if they are much more than a bit beyond sensor range, then they can quite difficult to find. For a player, it would be quite annoying to speed up time and waste ten minutes real time, only to realize he could have left at any time.

[Commander McLane]

I'm interested whether there is an OXP creating derelict carriers. I don't think I've ever met one. Perhaps it's an easter egg in Dredgers.oxp, and you're the first one to stumble across it?

[Commander Wilmot]

Sorry if I wasn't clear. My understanding was the oxp creates a station and it was suggested that instead it should create a carrier or have one jump into interstellar space. Commander Spartan suggested that the oxp could create a derelict carrier. Sorry for the recap, everyone else.

[Spartan]

Actually I goofed. As I understand it there is currently a bug/feature that any time you dock in interstellar space, you will be in a system when you launch again. I prefer to look at it as a free ride out, they opened a wormhole while you were docked. This happened to me the first time I misjumped, A Behemoth and a few fighters had survived the encounter, and I decided excellent, I can get some fuel. When I launched I was in a different system, not the one I left nor the one I was headed to. As I was happy to be back in civilized space I did not complain.

My story should have had me finding a wounded ship, a beacon would have been a good thing, and maybe a message to dock fast as they were gonna try to jump before repairs failed or some such.

apply handwavium as needed. Eh, it was just an off the top of my head quick response.